I don’t make a practice of responding to opinion columns in mainstream newspapers, especially when they’re not specifically or primarily about corruption. But the opening of Bret Stephens’ piece in yesterday’s New York Times caught my eye, mainly because the column used corruption in the Greek health care system as the “hook” for an argument that President Biden’s ambitious plans for an expanded social safety net will lead to American decline. Here’s how Stephens opens his column:

Years ago, Alexis Tsipras, the party leader of Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left, surprised me with a question. “Here in the United States,” the soon-to-be prime minister asked me over breakfast in New York, “why do you not have this phenomenon of passing money under the table?”

The subject was health care. Greece has a public health care system that, in theory, guarantees its citizens access to necessary medical care.

Practice, however, is another matter. Patients in Greek public hospitals, Tsipras explained, would first have to slip a doctor “an envelope with a certain amount of money” before they could expect to get treatment. The government, he added, underpaid its doctors and then looked the other way as they topped up their income with bribes.

Take a close look at any country or locality in which the government offers allegedly free or highly subsidized goods and you’ll usually discover that there’s a catch.

What is the point of opening with this anecdote (other than not-so-subtly alerting the reader that the author is the sort of important person who has chit-chats with world leaders)? The implication, so far as I can tell, seems to be that countries that provide free or heavily subsidized social welfare benefits tend to be more corrupt.

There is, however, an important problem with this argument: It’s not true.